Jean Tinguely — Méta-Matic drawing machines

1959

Artists: Jean Tinguely · Year: 1959 · Medium: Kinetic drawing machines — mechanical devices that produce abstract drawings on demand · Substrate: Welded metal frames, motors, mounted pens, paper · Place: Paris, France · Institution: Iris Clert Gallery (first exhibition) Jean Tinguely's Méta-Matic machines arrived at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris in July 1959 as a joke of serious intent. Each machine was a jittering steel armature of gears, eccentrics, and welded rod, built to hold a marker or a brush, and to produce, while the viewer watched or while a coin was dropped in, a small abstract drawing that was offered free or sold back to the audience. The machines mocked the authorial seriousness of Paris's abstract expressionist scene, but the mockery was also, quietly, a proposition. The proposition was that authorship in drawing could be located somewhere other than the hand: in the design of a mechanism, in the constraints of a kinematic linkage, in the contingent behavior of a spring. What the machines made was unrepeatable. Every drawing was different. None was composed. All were, recognizably, in the same style — because the style belonged to the mechanism. This is the argument that Harold Cohen would state explicitly fourteen years later about AARON, and that every contemporary generative artist restates every day. Tinguely got there in welded steel. The Méta-Matics scaled. Méta-Matic No. 17 was built for the 1959 First Biennale des Jeunes in Paris; it ran outdoors, was huge, and was meant to be unruly. Visitors fed it paper. It spat out hundreds of drawings. The machine's sound, its smell, its tendency to fall out of tune — all of that was the work too. This was the strongest early claim that process was a medium. Tinguely would push the logic further in 1960 with Homage to New York, the self-destructing machine staged in MoMA's sculpture garden, which was really the Méta-Matic argument pushed to its terminus: a kinetic apparatus whose single function was to finish and be gone. The Méta-Matics are softer, funnier, and more productive. They remain, sixty-five years later, one of the cleanest early arguments in this archive that machines make things. Lore At the 1959 Paris Biennale, Tinguely let the public feed paper into Méta-Matic No. 17 and take home whatever the machine drew. Somewhere around 40,000 drawings were produced during the exhibition; most were carried off. Tinguely signed none of them. He would sometimes say, when asked about authorship, that the machines were the artists and he was only the mechanic. A few of the drawings now bring meaningful prices at auction, catalogued by which machine made them rather than by Tinguely's hand. His wife and frequent collaborator Niki de Saint Phalle said that Jean's pleasure in those weeks was watching strangers leave the hall clutching paper, suddenly in possession of a drawing made on a machine that would never repeat itself. Sources • Tinguely, Jean — catalogue raisonné, Museum Tinguely, Basel. • Hultén, Pontus — Jean Tinguely: Méta (Editions Galerie Maeght, 1972). • Museum Tinguely, Basel — permanent collection and archive.